Kickboxing
A striking sport joining boxing hands with kicks. It appeared in the 1960s and 1970s in Japan and the United States at once, from a wish to give karate full contact.
Quick Facts
United StatesCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Kickboxing
About Kickboxing
Kickboxing appeared in the 1960s and 1970s in two places at once and from a similar impulse. In Japan, promoters were looking for a format that would give karate a full-contact ring form; in the United States, karateka wanted to fight at full power instead of point-stopped kumite. Out of both lines came what kickboxing now means: punches and kicks in a ring, in gloves, over rounds. There are several rulesets and the differences between them are not cosmetic. Full contact (the American line) allows kicks only above the waist. Low kick adds kicks to the thigh, which slows the fight down and hardens it considerably. K-1 rules, the most widespread today, additionally allow a limited clinch and knees. Elbows are used nowhere — that is what separates kickboxing from muay thai. Training is close to boxing: bag and pad work, shadow boxing, conditioning, sparring. Added to it is kicking technique and, above all, the ability to hold a stance from which one can both kick and box — two different balances. For an adult beginner kickboxing is one of the most practical choices: it yields usable skill, conditioning and contact experience quickly, and it does not demand the starting flexibility that taekwondo does. Head contact is a normal part of sparring, however, so training volume and the quality of coaching matter a great deal.
Styles & Branches
A Japanese kickboxing format from 1993 in which representatives of different striking styles met under shared rules. It was not an art but a competition brand.
The Dutch competitive school of kickboxing, born from Kyokushin karate meeting Japanese kickboxing. It is built on hand combinations finished with a kick.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.